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> ...I can't think of any project entirely focused on building from scratch and kick-starting the industrial motor of modern civilization. That's a national de

> ...I can't think of any project entirely focused on building from scratch and kick-starting the industrial motor of modern civilization. That's a national defense-scale ambition, and it is akin to asking, "what are the minimal constraints to reproduce X tech tree with Y years steady state sustainability?" You're basically asking what it takes to establish an independent human colony without support from home. The Long Now project is addressing a small sliver of the question by looking into what it takes to long-term sustainably perform some acts of information storage and dissemination. Folks into preparedness kick the can on the problem, assuming some certain level of infrastructure remains to pick over the remains of to rebuild/restart. The ones who can hold out for 10-20 years independently before rebooting over the remains of civilization are considered extremely well-funded and hardcore, but their generations-spanning outlook is pretty dim. Even the primitive skills-oriented teams have no good solution to how to pass those skills onto future generations, other than bigger communities to spread the information loss risk, and these teams are typically too small (a couple dozen at most) to look into that direction for a solution. But no one to my knowledge is working on the overall tech tree problem. Our entire civilization runs as a proprietary binary blob, with no reproducibility in the event of a DR incident. Even if you "just" "settle" for "only" a 1940-era tech base, we're probably looking at a minimum 45.3M people to participate. The 1939 "Census of Manufactures" identified 453 separate industry classifications. Guesstimate 100,000 absolute minimum number of people per classification, and that's going to be a lowball number of active participants. Toss in dependents and families, plus ancillary support and we're probably around 60M minimum? US 1939 population was 130.9M, so I'm guesstimating we can't get away with less than 50% to create a sustainable "reaction", 66M in round numbers. I'd probably peg it around 75-80% for robustness, and take all the information encoding technology we have today to increase the density of knowledge and know-how per worker to increase the robustness and recovery speed simultaneously instead of decreasing the number of people in the enterprise. Even with the benefit of perfect 20/20 hindsight of what worked and what did not in the past 80 years, it will likely still be a long slog. To give you a concrete glimpse into what "from scratch" entails, just look at the Gingery book series of what it takes to go from charcoal and scrap metal to a basic machine shop. Getting charcoal from bio-matter is a pretty straightforward task, if you've practiced it before. If you want to extend "scratch" to pulling ore and refining it, now the effort level gets to pretty large scales. Then coming up with refractory-grade clay. Don't forget how to feed yourself in the meantime. The complexity scale just to get beyond subsistence level from scratch is quite harrowing. Civilization is the most complex artifact the human species has created to date. Re-creating it from scratch would be a pretty tall order that no one has yet to offer even a proof of concept upon. I do welcome discussion on how to solve this with alternatives.

TeeMassive 6y ago
I wasn't aware of the long now project, I'll look into it. The point is that it's not totally from scratch and there's a very good proportion that can be passed on easily and a lot of trial & errors and research doesn't have to be done again. Mathematics can be learned with only books, important concept such as calculus doesn't have to be rediscovered. Major scientific discoveries don't have to be reinvented. Hard learned mistakes can be learned from History without making them. Prospected resources location can be saved and are static by nature. Also assuming that nothing whatsoever will remain is unlikely. Any such project should provision a set of plans to accommodate multiple level of destruction from the Bronze Age to pre-WW2 technology. Having some kind of roadmap with essential milestones like making concrete and the Haber process will save a lot of time. Disseminating the information in different ways such as stone tablets (like the Voyager Golden Record) to micro films could be done in a large scale for redundancy and could also be done for relatively cheap.
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  > The point is that it's not totally from scratch and there's a very good proportion that can be passed on easily and a lot of trial & errors and research doesn't have to be done again. The catch is there is a world of difference between what is in written form and operational practice, and yet another world of difference in operational practice at scale. Most of what is unwritten in civilization are operational practice, and doing so at scale; most of that is encoded behind commercial enterprises' walled gardens of information. As a concrete example, figure out what it would take to reconstruct the melt blown material manufacturing equipment. Or what it would take to construct an MDX lab. Or "just" a machine shop like Fireball Tools' capabilities. That kind of knowledge is extremely slow to percolate into an information transmissible form, if it ever makes it there. We don't have mind state capture and replay, unfortunately. There is lots of material on an even "lower" tech base-oriented activity, small-scale farming and/or ranching. And out of the tens of thousands of people in the developed world every year who want to take the plunge to grow their own food, there is insufficient "cookbook" recipes they can follow to enable them to easily do so, and of the many who do take the plunge, most do not stick it out past five years. People get a taste of this dynamic anytime they venture into hobbies that require some form of self-sufficiency, like hiking, camping, blue water sailing, and so on. The logistical tail to support those activities to where they can "launch" is quite extensive. I agree infrastructure-damaging incidents are extremely unlikely to uniformly take out all supply chains across the board. But planning-wise, there is no way to tell which parts of infrastructure would be adversely affected. The best we have been able to do as a species is to route around the damage on a best effort basis, relying upon the diversity/redundancy of sourcing and logistical alternatives, like with the COVID-19 pandemic and the Suez Canal backlog. As a "DR plan for civilization" posture however, that is insufficient. Like Microsoft Word, such a planner has to cater to lots of different scenarios (users), each with its own unique set of induced infrastructure gaps (requirements), ending up with a Franken-plan (Microsoft Word). It's not an easy or compact problem to solve as far as I can tell, though I'd be happy to be shown wrong. If we ever want to make off-world settlement a reality in the far future, then we have to solve this problem to some degree. The thought has occurred to me that making such a plan too compact holds within it a dark pattern: if it is too accessible to too-small an entity, then it encourages elites with sufficient resources and megalomania to pursue their own ideations of a world created in their own image. I suspect without humaniform robots and GAI however, that won't become a possible reality. I believe the scale and complexity of mind states to transfer around (densities of which are limited by human lifespans and in the base case, available energy) to accomplish the goal dictates pretty large population requirements out of reach of all but combinations of developed-world nation-states. It isn't all dire. We've solved this before, up to around the 17-18th century, arguably tapering off the competence around the 19th century. We haven't dusted off the outdated DR plan and updated it for our new "platform".

TeeMassive 6y ago

I wasn't aware of the long now project, I'll look into it. The point is that it's not totally from scratch and there's a very good proportion that can be passed on easily and a lot of trial & errors and research doesn't have to be done again. Mathematics can be learned with only books, important concept such as calculus doesn't have to be rediscovered. Major scientific discoveries don't have to be reinvented. Hard learned mistakes can be learned from History without making them. Prospected resources location can be saved and are static by nature. Also assuming that nothing whatsoever will remain is unlikely. Any such project should provision a set of plans to accommodate multiple level of destruction from the Bronze Age to pre-WW2 technology. Having some kind of roadmap with essential milestones like making concrete and the Haber process will save a lot of time. Disseminating the information in different ways such as stone tablets (like the Voyager Golden Record) to micro films could be done in a large scale for redundancy and could also be done for relatively cheap.

yourapostasy 6y ago
> The point is that it's not totally from scratch and there's a very good proportion that can be passed on easily and a lot of trial & errors and research doesn't have to be done again. The catch is there is a world of difference between what is in written form and operational practice, and yet another world of difference in operational practice at scale. Most of what is unwritten in civilization are operational practice, and doing so at scale; most of that is encoded behind commercial enterprises' walled gardens of information. As a concrete example, figure out what it would take to reconstruct the melt blown material manufacturing equipment. Or what it would take to construct an MDX lab. Or "just" a machine shop like Fireball Tools' capabilities. That kind of knowledge is extremely slow to percolate into an information transmissible form, if it ever makes it there. We don't have mind state capture and replay, unfortunately. There is lots of material on an even "lower" tech base-oriented activity, small-scale farming and/or ranching. And out of the tens of thousands of people in the developed world every year who want to take the plunge to grow their own food, there is insufficient "cookbook" recipes they can follow to enable them to easily do so, and of the many who do take the plunge, most do not stick it out past five years. People get a taste of this dynamic anytime they venture into hobbies that require some form of self-sufficiency, like hiking, camping, blue water sailing, and so on. The logistical tail to support those activities to where they can "launch" is quite extensive. I agree infrastructure-damaging incidents are extremely unlikely to uniformly take out all supply chains across the board. But planning-wise, there is no way to tell which parts of infrastructure would be adversely affected. The best we have been able to do as a species is to route around the damage on a best effort basis, relying upon the diversity/redundancy of sourcing and logistical alternatives, like with the COVID-19 pandemic and the Suez Canal backlog. As a "DR plan for civilization" posture however, that is insufficient. Like Microsoft Word, such a planner has to cater to lots of different scenarios (users), each with its own unique set of induced infrastructure gaps (requirements), ending up with a Franken-plan (Microsoft Word). It's not an easy or compact problem to solve as far as I can tell, though I'd be happy to be shown wrong. If we ever want to make off-world settlement a reality in the far future, then we have to solve this problem to some degree. The thought has occurred to me that making such a plan too compact holds within it a dark pattern: if it is too accessible to too-small an entity, then it encourages elites with sufficient resources and megalomania to pursue their own ideations of a world created in their own image. I suspect without humaniform robots and GAI however, that won't become a possible reality. I believe the scale and complexity of mind states to transfer around (densities of which are limited by human lifespans and in the base case, available energy) to accomplish the goal dictates pretty large population requirements out of reach of all but combinations of developed-world nation-states. It isn't all dire. We've solved this before, up to around the 17-18th century, arguably tapering off the competence around the 19th century. We haven't dusted off the outdated DR plan and updated it for our new "platform".